Is there a way to make dired buffers created by lists behave more like traditional dired?

Question

For example, when doing:

(dired '("custom-buffer" "~/.emacs.d" "/Volumes" "~/.bash_profile"))

I cannot sort, and when changing a name of a file it will not reappear in the buffer. An additional quirk is if I do dired-maybe-insert-subdir on /Volumes dired thinks I'm in the ~/.emacs.d and will not open /Volumes. I know in the docs it says the sorting behavior will not work as expected.

So I suppose I'm just asking if there is a package or something that just makes it so I can list a bunch of files and all the usual dired commands working as expected. Or is there a better way of dealing with an arbitrary group of files? The main feature I would like the most I suppose is sorting.

Answer 1

so I can list a bunch of files and all the usual dired commands working as expected. Or is there a better way of dealing with an arbitrary group of files? The main feature I would like the most I suppose is sorting.

Good question. I don't think there's anything you can do about such things.

Essentially, you're giving Dired a listing such as some ls might provide. Dired has no way of generating such a listing, and it knows nothing about it. Sorting etc. are handled by the ls program (the listing generator).

(I'm just happy that Dired will at least let me create such a listing, with directories and files from anywhere. That's pretty good, even if you can't do some ls-related things with it.)